An Interview with David R. Ellis and Craig Perry

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By Scott B.

"I think the challenge of doing the sequel when the original was such a hit and such a potent experience for moviegoers was to match it, at the very least, and hopefully go beyond it," says Final Destination 2 producer Craig Perry, speaking at a recent roundtable interview in Los Angeles about making a follow-up to the 2000 horror hit. "It took us a year to come up with the takes on the story. We heard over seventy different versions from a multitude of writers, and interestingly enough the original writer of the original film, Jeffrey Reddick, had an idea, and then John [Mackye Gruber] and Eric [Bress], who ultimately ended up writing the draft for Final Destination 2 had an idea, and independently they were good, but then we wove them together."

The eventual concept that became Final Destination 2 was firmly in the spirit of the original film, following a group of people who were supposed to die in a grisly tragedy (a plane crash in the first one; here, it's a spectacular freeway pile-up) and find themselves being picked off one-by-one by malevolent forces. "This film builds upon the notion that death is all around us. Both Final Destination films tap into that universal fear," says Perry. "Death could be in your car or your bathroom! The conceit is not so otherworldly that it stays on the movie screen. It follows you home."

But, Perry continues, the movie isn't just an exercise in morbidity: "I think what distinguishes this movie is that there's an undercurrent of dark humor through it. So at the end of the entire experience, you kind of have a little bit of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, this is all just for fun. We've structured the sequences in such a way that you're hopefully laughing before we deliver the goods, as it were. It's supposed to be funny. That's one of the gifts the writers brought to it &#Array; they're funny guys and they were able to make this potentially dark and dour experience much, much more palatable by having that humor." The film's director, David R. Ellis (an accomplished second unit director who worked on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and the upcoming Matrix Reloaded), concurs, adding: "You need the release. Otherwise it's too intense. You need to be able to come up for air."

Director David R. Ellis on the set of Final Destination 2

Laughs aside, Final Destination 2 does feature many memorably gruesome set pieces, as each unfortunate character meets their demise. While many recent horror films, like The Ring and the recent Darkness Falls, have chosen to go the teen-friendly PG-13 route, the makers of Final Destination 2 decided to go for the gore. "Obviously, this movie appeals to people who like the gore," says Ellis. "Although a lot of people are going to be against that, we've been applauded by our core audience for keeping it in the movie. So we, with the writers, just tried to be as sick as we could."

Part of that being "as sick as we could" was devising a number of Rube Goldberg-style deaths, where one tiny event sets off a chain reaction that results in someone's death. "One of the things we wanted to do was have people go into places where they're seemingly comfortable and then, after seeing this movie, kind of look at it with different eyes," explains Perry. He adds with a laugh: "They start to wonder 'Gee, if I poke this and it falls over to there is it going to cause this thing to SKEWER THROUGH MY EYE!'"

Although the Final Destination 2 is receiving positive buzz from test and preview audiences, and seems poised to repeat the impressive success of the first film, the makers haven't mapped out a third installment. "We haven't really thought about it," says Perry, although he does offer up one tantalizing possible take for another film in the series: "One thing that's really interesting is that with the subject matter being death, we haven't begun to tap into what other cultures and other countries think about death. So the world, literally, is our oyster!"